Ideographic languages such as Chinese, Japanese, or hieroglyphics are particularly difficult to adapt to an automated system such as a word processor or the like. The simple reason is that an ideographic language is comprised of an open-ended and unordered number of symbols, each representing a word or a concept. The more familiar alphabetic type of languages such as English, German, French or the like, are based upon the construction of words from a finite number of ordered characters. In English, the number is 26, the number of letters in the English alphabet. As a consequence, automation of office procedures and construction of an English typewriter was relatively easy. Similarly, other alphabet-type languages such as Russian or Hebrew are relatively easily applied to a keyboard with relatively few keys. On the other hand, the construction of a "typewriter" with relatively few keys to reproduce Oriental ideograms, either on a display screen or by printing, has lagged behind Western developments. For the most part, the failure to develop an efficient and adequate ideographic keyboard which is easily learned and of a compact size, is attributable to the massive number of characters utilized in the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean languages.
There have been efforts over the years to overcome the problems of mechanically generating an ideographic language from a keyboard. One of the early efforts occurred after the advent of the telegraph. The Chinese linguists developed a dictionary of about 8,000 to 9,000 characters and associated with each character an Arabic number. This permitted the telegraph operators in the Orient to transmit a series of numerals of up to four digits in a group to signify a character. While this achieved the rudimentary goal desired at the time, it did not permit the complete expression of ideas to be transmitted or developed.
Early efforts in developing ideographic keyboards have required large numbers of keys (for example, about 200), with each key controlling several characters, in order to accomplish any degree of flexibility. It is well known that, at least as far as the Oriental languages are concerned, combinations of characters or combinations of something less than a character may form new words. Thus, the relatively limited number of keys, such as 200, proved workable in the early days of automation. However, in recent years, with the explosion of technology, it has proved difficult to keep up with the needs of business with such complex keyboards, which are difficult to use, not to mention the long and tedious learning process associated with their use.
Present technology includes a Kana-Kanji conversion system available on a keyboard having about 50 keys. In this system, the operator "types" in the sound of the Kanji character in Kana. The Kanji homophones are then displayed on a screen for selection by the operator. Since there may be numerous homophones, the system is limited to a search and retrieve operation rather than a true "touch typing" system.
Efforts to classify the Oriental character set into a workable number of descriptors or components have resulted in various schemes, most notably the three-corner system where the user identifies the shape of the character by reference to the corners. In order to avoid awkwardness, a large number of keys is still required when using the three-corner system.
As is well known, the Japanese language utilizes a subset of the Chinese character set, with the addition of the Katakana and Hiragana character sets. While the Chinese character set is open-ended and may have in excess of 60,000 or 70,000 identifiable characters, the Japanese character set, which is commonly referred to as Kanji, used approximately 10,000 to 15,000 of the Chinese characters. Of these 10,000 to 15,000 characters, about 2,500 are sufficient to provide 99.9 percent of the characters found in a newspaper, with about 600 characters being sufficient to convey an idea. While the smaller Kanji character set is more easily mastered than the more complex and larger classical Chinese character set, a keyboard to support the 2,500 newspaper characters would still be cumbersome if it were not possible to classify or break down the Kanji character set into smaller pieces. In many instances, the Kanji character set has been broken into "descriptors" which may be "less than" a word. However, even in these cases, the number of keys is large. Previous attempts to group like descriptor keys in the same vicinity have not proved overly successful because of the necessity to scan several keys to find the desired descriptor.
In addition to Kanji, the Japanese language includes the phonic-based "alphabets" of Katakana and Hiragana, each having about fifty or sixty symbols representing a sound. Katakana is particularly adapted to express sounds and assimilated words such as "baseball" and "computer." Hiragana is used for particles such as prepositions and also for grammatical endings.
With the interchange of technology with Western nations, some English words and many English corporate symbols, such as "IBM" or "GIT," are expressed in English letters interspersed in the middle of Japanese text expressed in Kanji.
Therefore, it is now necessary that automated word processing in Japanese include not only a relatively large Kanji character set (about 2,000characters), but also the Katakana, Hiragana and English character sets.
In existing keyboards adapted for Oriental languages, the number of keys is either large with the concomitant reduction of keystrokes/characters (about 600), or the number of keys is low (about 50) with a relatively high number of keystrokes per character.
Finally, earlier attempts to classify or group characters have been relatively unsuccessful when associated with the natural "writing" sequence taught to students of the Japanese written language.